Burgh Island certainly knows how to make an entrance. As you descend the hill at dusk into Bigbury-on-Sea the white hotel drinks up all the light. Like a flashy piece of costume jewellery, it’s the only thing you notice on the skyline. But, then again, it’s used to making good first impressions. Despite its diminutive size, the island appears in Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun before any of the novel’s characters, upstaging even Hercule Poirot.
The reader is never in any doubt that the book’s murder will hinge entirely on ‘the little windswept gull-haunted promontory – cut off from land at each high tide’ and the ‘comfortable and most exclusive hotel’ on its most northerly shore.
Christie isn’t known for her sense of place: her settings are usually seen as blank canvases for the crimes, dashed off in a few sentences before the plot can get underway. But it would be wrong to assume she didn’t care about setting – and nowhere is this more true than South Devon’s Burgh island, a landscape she knew intimately.
It’s as though, by crossing the causeway, you’ve arrived in another world – one where the usual rules don’t apply.
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